Project scheduling with time-varying resource constraints

With industrial projects increasing in complexity and size, determining realizable schedules that efficiently utilize limited resources represents one of the most challenging project management tasks. In this context, the well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem has been extensively studied. However, due to its restrictive assumptions, it allows only partial modelling of real-world scheduling problems. Therefore, this paper deals with a generalized version that considers more evolved types of precedence relationships as well as time-varying resource availabilities, e.g. due to maintenance or vacations. For this problem, appropriate heuristic solution methods, based on priority rules and tabu search, are proposed and evaluated concerning their effectiveness.